Crime statistics provided by the Coast Guard and local police organizations have shown that in the last several years, the number of burglaries, vandalism and the theft of both land-based vehicles and marine vessels have increased dramatically. For example, Coast Guard statistics indicate that 75,000 vessels have been reported stolen in the last five years and insurance companies report that claims in excess of $200,000,000.00 have been reported each year. Furthermore, the Coast Guard has reported that in the year 1982 alone, nearly 50,000 calls for assistance were answered for pleasure craft and that over 150,000 people were assisted and nearly 5,700 lives saved.
Consequently, various systems have been developed which endeavor to monitor the current position and status of either a land-based vehicle, such as personal automobiles, fleets of cars, trucks, taxis or police cruisers, mobile homes or vans and pleasure crafts such as yachts. Additionally, other systems have been developed for monitoring a vehicle or vessel for the presence of a malfunction, a fire condition or an unauthorized intrusion.
Motorola Communications and Electronics, Inc. of Schaumburg, Ill. is currently developing a land-based tracking system for determining the current position of vehicles provided with an existing mobile communications system between a central dispatcher and each individual vehicle. This system, which could be employed by police departments, taxi companies and fleets of trucks, utilizes a LORAN-C chain employing a single master and only two secondary transmitters to determine the particular latitude/longitude coordinates of the vehicles. However, problems have developed in implementing this system since each of the receivers provided in the land-based vehicle determine the particular coordinates of that vehicle and then transmits these coordinates to the central dispatching station. Since the LORAN-C signal is a ground wave, the velocity of the wave is altered by a variety of natural or man-made sources of interference, as well as being adversely affected by the particular terrain over which it passes. Although the Motorola system is cognizant of these problems, they chose to correct any inaccuracies by compensating for the errors generated by these sources of interference in the unit installed in each vehicle, each unit geared to a particular regional area. Therefore, regardless of whether these compensation techniques adequately rectify the errors generated by the LORAN-C transmissions, these compensation factors would have absolutely no application or use if the particular vehicle was no longer in its assigned region. Additionally, this system is used merely to determine the position of the vehicle and cannot be applied to monitor more than one manually set condition of the vehicle, nor can it be utilized to adequately determine whether the vehicle has been stolen.
A second vehicle tracking system is presently being developed by II Morrow, Inc. of Salem, Oreg. This system is in many respects very similar to the Motorola system in that it can only be used for land-based vehicles, the determination of the exact coordinates of a particular vehicle is directly calculated by the unit provided in each vehicle and no provision is made for automatically monitoring the condition of the vehicle.
Therefore, no existing system is presently available which adequately and accurately monitors the position of either a land-based vehicle, airplane or a sea-going vessel, determines whether that vehicle or vessel is currently being stolen and continuously monitors various operating parameters of that particular vehicle, airplane or vessel.